The pioneers are settling down---they want to live here [LWN.net]

The pioneers are settling down---they want to live here

Posted Aug 8, 2002 16:45 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054)
Parent article: Where has the pioneer spirit of LWN gone?

Dear Mr. Wardman:

Let me suggest a different slant on the situation.

What impels you to spend money to subscribe to a magazine?
It's not the paper---cheaper and more useful can be had at your local stationers.
It's not the words---those can be found wholesale in a dictionary.
It's not the discussion---Usenet is full of it.
It's not the ads (barring, say, The Computer Shopper :-).

It's the editing.

You pay because an intelligent, well-written person, whose interests parallel some of yours, has spent their time:

searching for news,
sorting out the trash,
writing up the remainder in clear, informed, grammatical prose, and
organizing the result so you can easily find the pieces you want.

All so you needn't.

LWN's editors do that in spades. Their awareness of the Linux world is wide-ranging; their selections are interesting and, frequently, important; their writing is simply unmatched on the Internet, and is better than all but the highest-quality magazines (New York Times, hang your head), and the layout is great.

So, you want this from someone's spare time?

We pay to get good editors in other media, and unless we wise up and start doing so online, we won't have any. Paying for LWN is paying for the best---if we can't do so, we're a truly sorry lot.

Thanks, all of you editors. You do an incredible job, and deserve to be able to live a normal life while doing it.

Best wishes,
Max Hyre

[None of the foregoing is mitigated by the fact that the editors in most periodicals are paid by the advertisers: you pay the magazine's price, however little it covers of the full cost, for the editing.]

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